Current designs for long rod penetrator military rounds such as the Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot (APFSDS) use aluminum and steel stabilizer fins located upon an aft stabilizer unit to maintain flight stability. Such stabilizer fins are designed to meet requirements such as low mass, sleek profile, shell-firing survivability, in-flight ablative resistance, and high partibility. Present stabilizer units including the stabilizer fins are machined as single, integral metal pieces from aluminum or steel. Generally, the stabilizer unit is then joined by threads, by welding or by a crimping process to the penetrator rod of the round or projectile. Such machined one-piece metal stabilizer units suffer several limitations including: in-flight ablation related to the selection of the particular metal; difficulty in achieving any significant weight reduction of the stabilizer unit; and, difficulty in meeting selected producibility criteria such as the speed of production and cost.
U.S. Patents Nos. 4,732,086 and 4,825,518 address one effort at improving the stabilizer fin unit and describe a stabilizer unit wherein metal fin segments are joined to a sleeve of the stabilizer unit by laser welding.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide stabilizer units including non-integral stabilizer fins joined into the central body of the stabilizer unit by an injection molding polymer.
It is a further object of this invention to provide composite stabilizer units including non-integral stabilizer fins joined into the central body of the stabilizer unit wherein the central body of the stabilizer unit is comprised of the engineering grade polymer.
It is a still further object of this invention to provide stabilizer units formed by an injection molding process wherein the non-integral stabilizer fins are simultaneously joined by an engineering grade polymer in an injection molding process to the stabilizer unit body as the stabilizer unit body, comprised of the engineering grade polymer, is joined in the injection molding process to the penetrator rod of the projectile.